


Say You'll Remember Me

by Kaesa



Category: Wildest Dreams - Taylor Swift (Music Video)
Genre: (sort of), Actors, F/M, Golden Age Hollywood, Infidelity, Period-Typical Attitudes, implied alcoholism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-29
Updated: 2016-05-29
Packaged: 2018-07-10 21:19:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7008559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kaesa/pseuds/Kaesa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Up-and-coming starlet Marjorie Finn knows better than to let her costar turn her head.  Everyone knows he's a heartbreaker, and he might even be engaged.  But she figures just this once, as long as she doesn't get too attached, she can have a little fling.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Say You'll Remember Me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Joanne_c](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Joanne_c/gifts).



Robert Kingsley was a walking disaster.  Sure, they kept it out of the papers for the most part, but Marge had heard the rumors -- the drinking, the girls, and an awful lot of vague talk about that one incident at the Biltmore with the baked Alaska and the brand new Jaguar.  Or had it been an actual jaguar?  She'd heard several versions of the story, none of them flattering to Mr. Kingsley.

Still, he'd been nothing but a gentleman to her at read-throughs and rehearsals, and if the script was anything to go by, previous experience in not being eaten by big cats would be valuable.

Although, if she was being honest with herself, she was feeling a lot more intimidated by him than the lion her character would almost be eaten by.  He was -- well.  No matter his reputation in private, he was a fantastic actor.  And more to the point, he was even more handsome in person than he'd ever been in the magazines.

Well, what business did she have being an actress if she couldn't feign disinterest?  She'd been in enough pictures before the studio'd finally taken a chance on her as a leading lady, and she'd seen plenty of behind-the-scenes romances turn into disasters and scandals, and she was not going to throw her career away for some pretty boy.  She was smarter than that.

She was smarter than that, at least, until the clapperboard clicked, the cameras started rolling, and he kissed her like there was no one in the world but the two of them.

That was always the trouble with filming everything out of order -- sometimes it got your emotional arc all jumbled up.

* * *

In California, Mr. Musterhausen had been absolutely thrilled with their chemistry, but now that they were on location he seemed less enchanted.  She was kind of relieved, actually, because after this many takes with the sun beating down on them and the dust getting in everyone's eyes, kissing Robert Kingsley was almost not exciting anymore.  "Cut!" he shouted for what seemed like the eighty-seventh time, and she pulled away from him.

"Christ, Gus, I think I know how to kiss a pretty girl," snapped Kingsley.

"It's not the  _kiss,_ " said Mr. Musterhausen, getting up from his chair.  "Look!  Look at all of this!"  He waved behind them.  Marge looked at the scrubby trees and distant hills they were filming in front of, but Kingsley made no movement.  In fact, his hand was still around her waist.

She startled as Patty from makeup hurried over to touch up her lipstick.  "Ah, sorry, could you just turn your head a little and close your eyes and --"

"Right, right," said Marge.  She held still, and closed her eyes.

"See the magnificent vista before you?" said Mr. Musterhausen.

"Yes," said Marge, although, of course, she couldn't -- she could just feel Patty and Anne giving her face another once-over.

"I wouldn't say it's a vista," said Kingsley.

"You must put  _all_  of it into this kiss!" said Mr. Musterhausen.  "All of it!  It must be the most majestic kiss ever captured on film!  Every rock, every sunbeam, every hill!"

"Even that little tree over there?" Kingsley asked.

"Yes!  Yes!  _Especially_  that little tree over there!" said Mr. Musterhausen.

The makeup brushes withdrew, and after a moment Marge decided it was safe to open her eyes.  It was not a very impressive tree.  She caught Kingsley's eye.  "Think I had a kiss like that tree in our second grade production of Sleeping Beauty," she said under her breath.

"Oh?" he asked.

"It's a wonder I bothered waking up for it," she said.

He snorted.  "We'll do our best, Gus," he called to Mr. Musterhausen.  He turned back to her.  "Ready?"

She nodded.

"Well, okay, then."

Mr. Musterhausen called for silence, and they began again.

* * *

During their first break, she poked at her baked beans and watched Kingsley study his script seriously.  He spoke to no one except, oddly enough, his stuntman, and he drank from a little flask he kept in a pocket.  The rest of the cast, mostly older character actors who'd worked on everything with everyone, were talking and laughing together at a different table.

"I've heard he's kind of a pain," said Patty, finally breaking the silence.  "Did you ever hear about that incident with the jaguar and the baked Alaska at the Biltmore?" she asked.

Marge wondered which version of events Patty had heard.  Did that J sound capitalized?  "I don't know, it sounded pretty unlikely," she said.  "Besides, he's been a perfect gentleman so far."

Patty laughed.  "Of course he has," she said.  "It's barely been a day.  Although, here in the middle of nowhere I don't know what trouble he can get himself into."

"Lions," said Anne.  "He can get himself into lions.  I don't trust those animal trainers Mr. Musterhausen's brought in, do you?  Some of them are  _natives._ "

Patty rolled her eyes.  "It's _Africa,_ Anne, were you expecting them to be border collies?  Although back when we were filming that horrible thing about Scotland we had a terrible time getting  _them_  to behave.  Much too highly-strung.  Lions'll be a cinch, they're just big cats, right?  Probably the worst they'll do is fall asleep in inconvenient places."

"Oh, that's what you say now," said Anne, "but did you ever hear about those lions who picked off all the railroad workers --"

"Oh, that was fifty years ago, come on, we have -- we have  _modern lion-taming methods_  now," said Patty.

Marge looked between Patty and Anne and decided she didn't want to hear about all the reasons she and her co-star were absolutely definitely  _not_ going to be eaten by lions, because Patty sounded so sure about everything all the time and was wrong so often that she wasn't reassuring at all.  "If you'll excuse me," she said, picking up her plate, "I'm going to go talk to him about our next scenes."

She hurried to Kingsley's table.  He didn't even look up from his script, which surprised her a little, given his reputation.  The stuntman -- she thought his name was George? -- smiled at her.  "What's with you?  You look pretty spooked," he said.

"Um.  Nothing!" she said quickly.

"I have that effect on women," said Kingsley smoothly.  He made a note on his script.

George snorted.  "Nah,  _I_  have that effect on women.  You're the one they're crazy for."

"Well if you must know, they were talking about lions over there," she said, nodding towards Patty and Anne.

"Oh, so you're allergic to cats, is that it?" said George.  Kingsley elbowed him in the ribs, hard.

"No," said Marge.  "I just -- it's --"

"Tranquilizers," said Kingsley.

"What?" she asked.

"You're worried about the scene where you mug with the lion and I tell you not to, right?" Kingsley asks.

She looked down at her unappetizing plate of baked beans.  "I …might be," she admitted.  She was playing a daring but foolish heiress, but she had some trouble believing that even the dimmest bulb would act like  _that._ "But I have to pull the lion's tail!  That seems like asking for trouble."

"They'll figure it out," said Kingsley.  "There's no way you're going to actually pull an actual lion's tail," he said.  That made her feel a little better, until he added, "Unless Gus decides a little more realism is worth the risk."

" _What?_ " she asked.  Who was Gus?  Oh, Gustof Musterhausen, the director.

Kingsley laughed.  "Don't worry about it!  I was joking!  Mostly.  Old Gus listens to reason most of the time, and I know casting's been looking for a stunt double for you so you don't have to worry about dodging the lion yourself."  He was smiling a little lopsidedly now.  "Jeez, you were really scared, weren't you?"

"No," she said.  It was a lie, of course, but she made it sound convincing.  "Just a little jittery, you know how it is.  New place, new movie."

"New people," he supplied.  "Yeah, I know how it is.  Tell you what, I'll talk to Gus about it if you want.  I'll ask a few questions, tell him  _I'm_  concerned.  You've got nothing to fear, though, trust me.  Old Gus is a good guy, despite his… eccentricities."

She nodded.  When he said  _Trust me_  like that she very much wanted to.  She didn't go so far as to actually trust him, but it was a nice feeling anyway.  "Thank you, Mr. Kingsley --"

"Hey, I think after all those takes this morning we should be on first name basis, don't you?  Call me Robert.  And you're Marjorie --"

"Just Marge," she said.  "Actually it's my middle name, I --"

He laughed.  "Oh, don't tell me, I know how the press agents operate," he said.  "Everyone who's anyone in this town isn't who they started off as."

"This town being the Serengeti?" she asked, raising an eyebrow.

He frowned, then dismissed her question with a cheerful wave of his hand.  "We're a small island of Hollywood in a sea of sanity.  Anyway, I'll ask about the lions!"  He turned to George.  "And let me know about, uh, what we talked about, all right?"

"Yeah, yeah, I'll get right on it.  Don't hold your breath, though, I don't know if he actually knows anything," said George, rolling his eyes.  He was grinning, though.  He stood.  "Gotta talk to Musty anyway about the hunting scene."  He grabbed his plate as he left.

"Musty?" she asked Mr. K-- she asked  _Robert._

"He means Gus Musterhausen," he said.  "It's your first time working with him, huh?"

"Yes," she said, trying not to sound worried.  "Is he… is he all right?  He seemed kind of …strange."

Robert gave her a broad smile.  "Yeah, he can be pretty odd sometimes, but don't worry, he's a great guy.  Mostly sensible when you need him to be, too.  Just don't let him start telling you about the script he's written.  There's a reason nobody'll produce it."

"Why, what is it about?"  She  _had_  to know now.

"Oh, every iteration gets weirder and weirder."  He shrugged.  "Last time he told me about it and I couldn't get away, I think it was a Western, and one of the bad guys rode a unicorn.  He was from the Moon," he said.  "I assume it was a metaphor for something, although I'm not sure what.  I had had a few too many at the time, to be fair."

"I didn't realize they had unicorns on the moon," she said.

"And that's why we're lucky to have that great visionary, Gustof Musterhausen, to tell us these things!" said Robert.  "My point is… sometimes with him you just have to nod and smile and wait 'til the end of the day.  And never,  _never_  ask him what kind of movie he'd most like to make."

She laughed.  "Well, if I see any moon villains I know just the man to deal with them, then."  She felt much more at ease now that she knew Robert Kingsley had a sense of humor even offscreen.  "Do you want to go over the lines for our next couple scenes?" she suggested.  "I'm still not sure I like the dialogue, to be honest, but maybe I'd feel more comfortable with it if I heard it aloud again."

"Ah, I see how it is, you're all business," he said.  "And here I am gossiping like some old hen."

"Just doing my job," she said, grinning.  "Truth is I'm afraid I don't know enough gossip to impress such venerable poutry."

He laughed.  "Yeah, I was asking for that, wasn't I?" he said.  He got out his script and skimmed.  "You wanna start?"

"Sure!" she said.  She took a deep breath and slid into her angry diamond mine heiress voice.  Onscreen she'd be assuming he was a trespasser, and he'd be insisting this was no place for a woman.  She'd slap him at least twice and then he'd win her over anyway.  It was a story that played well against any backdrop as long as the actors had enough fire in them to make it seem new.  " _Just who do you think you are, anyway?_ "

" _Who do I think_ I _am?  Who do you think_ you _are?_ "

She let a touch of nervousness flavor her indignance.  " _Well, I'm --_ "

" _And what are you doing here, anyway?  Don't you know this place is dangerous?_ "

He was so good at sounding patronizing that she barely had to act to spit out " _Well if you must know, I_ own _this land!_ " and she knew they were going to make a hell of a scene out of this lousy script.

* * *

When Mr. Musterhausen finally called it a night, Marge stepped away from the almost-kiss they'd been filming, stretched, and shook out her arms.  She was pleased with herself; she'd finally gotten comfortable enough with Robert Kingsley that she could enjoy how attractive he was without feeling flustered during their romantic scenes.  It didn't mean anything, it was just in the script.

But then he slid his arm around her and apparently, when it wasn't in the script it got to her pretty bad.  "C'mon," he said, casually, "let's get out of here."  The graceful chaos of the crew cleaning up for the night whirled around them for a moment while she considered the tilt of his smile.

She decided to lean into him.  She'd been on her feet all day, after all.  "Oh?"

"I know a little place not too far from here where we could watch the sun set and get a drink.  You interested?"

She laughed.  "A nice little watering hole?" she asked.  She knew there weren't any restaurants or nightclubs for miles; if he said that was it, he'd have to mean it literally.

"Hmm.  Maybe a little classier than that," he said.

All right, now she was intrigued.  "Lead on, then."

So he took her hand and led her due west, towards the setting sun.  The sound of the crew faded, and she was very glad that after having the sustained focus of an entire film crew for hours on end, they were now, for at least a few hours, the least important people in the production.

They stopped at a little cluster of four trees, and he put an arm around her again.  "Well, how do you like that?"

"Beautiful.  ...Don't think I don't know what you're doing, by the way," she said.

"What am I doing, outside of enjoying one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen?" he asked.

"The sunset's pretty good too," she said, grinning.

"Hey!  That's my line," he said.

"Well now I see why you need the script," she said.  She resisted the urge to lean into him.

"You know, I was going to offer you something to drink," he said, mock-offended, "but maybe I won't bother."  He left her and started towards the largest of the scraggly trees.

"They did warn me about you," she said.  "Robert Kingsley's got a weakness for women.  He leaves a trail of broken-hearted girls everywhere he goes.  And so on.  It won't work on me."

"You're here now, aren't you?" he asked.

She put her hands on her hips.  "Acting is thirsty work, and I was promised a drink," she said.  "Which offer has apparently been rescinded, so maybe I'll--"

"Hey, hang on!  I was only kidding," he said.  He knelt at the roots of the tree.

"Costume's gonna give you hell for that," she said, but he paid her no mind and concentrated on digging.  "What are you --"

"Told you I could offer you a drink!"  He held up a dirty bottle of… something alcoholic, she assumed.

She wrinkled her nose.  "What is that?"

"Scotch!  George said he knew someone who might be able to get us some.  It's --"  He looked at the label.  "Well, it's not  _bad_  stuff," he said, in a tone that suggested it certainly wasn't good, either.  "Less lethal than the local stuff, apparently."

"...hell, why not?" she said.  "I'll have a swig.  But… look, about those broken-hearted girls --"

"What, you know any of 'em?" he asked, unscrewing the top of the bottle.

"No, but --"  She shook her head.  "I don't plan to become one of them."

"Well, that's fine," he said.  "I don't plan to break any hearts in the near future."  He took a drink, and passed the bottle to her.

She took it, but hesitated.  "Word is you have a fiancée, but nobody knows who it is."

"Hmm.  I wouldn't trust those gossip magazines you've been reading," he said.  "That's just a rumor."

"Really," she said.  It wasn't a question, she just didn't believe him.

"Really," he said, and he sounded very convincing.  But when her expression didn't change, he softened.  "Hey, I'm being honest here.   _Somebody_  had been talking to the papers, so I rounded up the usual suspects and told all of them a different lie.  The fiancée was one of those stories.  She's not real."

"Oh."  Well, now she felt stupid.  It was completely plausible, and it would explain why it hadn't been more widely-circulated.

"What I'm more interested in," he said, "is that you still read that tripe and believe some of it.  Are you a  _fan_ , Miss Finn?"  He grinned.

She didn't think the makeup she had on was thick enough to hide her blush.  "Just keeping track of what they say about me!" she insisted.  Vanity was entirely forgivable in Hollywood, and much less risible than getting your gossip from the newsstand.

He didn't bother trying not to laugh, and rather than struggling to find a good comeback, she took a longer drink of the scotch than she'd quite meant to.  Once she'd stopped coughing, she swore.  "This stuff is  _awful,_ " she said, handing the bottle back to him.

He fished the cap out of his pocket and screwed it back onto the bottle.  "Yeah, guess I should talk to George about that," he said.  "Still, the sunset's nice.  And the company."

And then she figured,  _oh, what the hell, you only live once.  You only film in Africa with a ridiculously handsome costar once -- maybe twice if you're lucky.  Might as well make the most of it, even if it ends badly._

He didn't object when she grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him in, although he did drop the bottle.  When their lips met, he tasted like terrible scotch and smelled like sweat and dirt, and there was no director telling them how to stand, and it was  _fantastic._

* * *

In the past few weeks she'd settled into enough of a routine that it didn't feel like she was roughing it anymore.  She'd wake up just in time to see Robert ducking out of her tent, the space next to her still warm from his body, and, groggily, she'd get ready for another day of journeying across the same five picturesque parts of the Serengeti, shot at slightly different angles.

While she was getting her hair and makeup ready she couldn't do much talking -- Patty did it all for her mostly, filling her in on who was sleeping with who, who was working through a hangover, and who was currently in- or out-of-favor with various important people on set; these included Mr. Musterhausen, his assistant, Mr. Bailey the cook, and Elise, the costume standby.  Marge paid close attention to all this gossip not because she particularly cared about it for its own sake, but because it was useful.  She knew, for example, that George the stuntman was in the center of a love triangle between two of the wardrobe girls, and that he had struck up a friendship with the fellow who handled the giraffes and zebras, whose name was Harry.  Harry must be pretty likeable, she thought, because he was also apparently quite close with Edwin Patterson, who was playing a minor comic relief character.

None of which was of any immediate interest to her on its own, but it presented her with a possible solution to a minor problem she'd been having since the day after Robert had offered her some scotch.  

She was under no illusions that this was somehow a love affair for the ages, of course.  For the duration of the film shoot it made working with him a lot more pleasant, but she'd told herself she wasn't going to get attached.  She suspected Robert's relative stability was due to being out here in the middle of nowhere, but back in California he'd probably get himself in trouble as soon as he stepped off the plane.  But she did wish she could do something to curb Robert's drinking.  He was actually a very pleasant drunk, but the hangover made him angry and unpleasant.  She didn't particularly want to bother Mr. Musterhausen with it, because he probably already knew, but if she could pull a few strings…

So today, after she'd watched Robert go, yawned, and rolled out of bed herself, she came up with a plan.  She was certain Robert got his terrible scotch from George, who, Marge suspected, got it from the giraffe handler, who was staying in a nearby town and, of course, only came out to the set when there were giraffes that needed handling.

She made a vague and mostly ineffective attempt to comb her hair, and brushed her teeth, although she was nearly out of toothbrushing water and would have to remember to ask for more today.  (A few people had already gotten sick from drinking untreated water, although Mr. Musterhausen had warned her that getting sick would be terrible for her complexion and she must at all costs avoid it.  She was kind of hoping he'd get sick after that, although she did feel a little bad about it.

She stumbled out to breakfast, which was… oatmeal, again.  She was the only actress in the film with a speaking role, so she tended to have breakfast with the makeup and costume crew, which was fine by her because she could get her daily gossip update and maintain diplomatic ties with the people who could make her life miserable if they liked.  Lunch and dinner she had with the rest of the cast, because by then she had real makeup on and was awake enough to keep up with the rest of them.

"And how's Mr. Kingsley doing today?" Elise the costume standby asked.  "Tell him he has to stop romping around and getting everything dirty and stained just for kicks."

Marge sipped at her coffee, which tasted like chicory and death.  She swallowed with some difficulty.  "Hm.  Can't promise he'll listen."  What she  _wanted_  to say was _Most of that's in the script,_  but everyone knew Elise was perpetually grumpy because she wanted to be back in California doing sweeping eighteenth-century dramas shot on soundstages, and if you didn't want to be called back to the costume trailer eighteen more times than was necessary and "accidentally" stuck with pins several of those times, you tried to stay on her good side.  (Robert was remarkably unperceptive about this kind of thing, and didn't really listen to her when she'd hinted at it, so he got stuck with pins very frequently.)

Robert often came up in these breakfast conversations.  She had never admitted that she and Robert were anything more than good friends, of course, but she knew it was common knowledge on the set anyway.  People were just too polite to bring it up to her face.  And she figured it'd make it easier to end things with him if she hadn't spent much time talking about herself and Robert as anything more than coworkers.

"Don't you have that scene with Ed Patterson today?" Patty asked.

"Yeah.  With the hooting monkeys," she said, rubbing her eyes.  Her plan to halt the flow of spirits into Robert's tent (and afterwards, his mouth) involved asking Mr. Patterson to intervene with his friend the giraffe handler.

"I'm so curious about whether he's as funny in real life as he is onscreen," said Patty.  "Jane's doing his makeup, aren't you, Jane?"

Jane, the quietest of the makeup girls, nodded.  "He's been a pretty good sport about everything so far.  Mostly he talks about how much he misses his dog."

"Well, he's got monkeys in this scene, maybe that'll help his homesickness," said Marge.

"Are monkeys much like dogs?" Jane asked, doubtfully.

Marge had always been more interested in horses than dogs, and had yet to encounter a monkey she didn't find creepy, so she just shrugged.  "I guess I'll find out today."

After breakfast, she was pulled into the costume trailer and then back out to have her makeup done.  She asked Patty a few questions about this giraffe handler (he was a local, so she was not much help) and resolved to take Ed Patterson aside and talk about the scotch situation sometime in between scenes.  Then she headed out, and saw Robert for, well, the second time that day, actually.  She liked his scruffy, sleepy morning self a lot, but the faux-scruffy hunter-explorer version of him was also pretty good looking, she had to admit.  "Morning," she said.  "I forget, what kind of fight are we starting filming with today?"

"Something about my cooking, I think," he said.

"You cook?" she asked, grinning at the mental image this gave her, of his grumpy character standing in her mother's kitchen at home.  "Oh, that's right, there's that one scene where the fish burns.  I'm not sure I'd consider that  _cooking._ "

"Well they didn't write it based on  _me,_ " he said, looking disproportionately offended.  "For your information I am perfectly capable of not burning fish over a campfire."

She snorted and nudged him with her elbow.  "Don't be silly, I didn't mean it like that.  By the way, if you're curious, I can't cook at all except scrambled eggs."

"What, really?" he asked.

"It's true.  You know how some people are just  _born_  to do something really well?  I was born to go out to dinner every night.  I excel at it."  She was rewarded with a laugh, and he was still grinning as Mr. Musterhausen shouted at everyone to take their places.

* * *

A couple of days later she was lying on her bed in her tent, listening to the radio and writing a letter to a friend back home, and generally relishing the time alone, in the shade, out of character, when Robert stormed into her tent.

"Do you  _know_  what old Musty's done?" he snapped.  "He's cut me off!"

She propped herself up on her elbows and frowned, trying to figure out who Musty was.  Ah.  Musterhausen.  "You mean… the guy you've been calling 'good old Gus' this entire time?"

" _That_ guy, yeah.  What a traitor!  You think you know someone and then --"

"Before I decide he's the worst thing since moldy bread, would you please tell me what he's done?" she asked.  "Cut you off how?"

"Well, I don't know how but he managed to figure out how I'd been getting my scotch, and look, I know you're not too happy about that, but come on, in this weather sometimes I get thirsty!  And it's stressful, being all alone, and -- not that I'm _alone,_ " he said quickly, seeing her very pointed look.  "But.  You know!  And -- and, look, he  _likes_  you, could you maybe put in a good word for me?"  He gave her what she now thought of as his publicity shot look.  It was charming, sweet, and entirely insincere.

She sat up the rest of the way.  "I don't think I can do that, Robert," she said.  Ugh, she was going to have to tell him, wasn't she?  No point implicating Ed, he'd been very surprised when she'd asked him for the favor, and very understanding, and through him she'd paid the giraffe handler more than Robert was paying him to  _not_  smuggle the scotch in.  It'd worked beautifully until Robert had actually noticed it, apparently.  Still, maybe there was more to this that she'd missed -- maybe she could get away without confessing.  Maybe Musterhausen had taken the credit.  "Did he  _say_  he'd cut you off?"

"No!  Actually, he told me he knew I'd been drinking and he was fine with it!  He blamed some mythical other person for it.  Can you believe that?"

"Well, I've never been called mythical before," she said.  She immediately regretted it; it was another one of those smartass remarks that had always gotten her into trouble, ever since she was a kid.

" _What?_ " he said.  "You?"

"Well, I guess the cat's out of the bag."  She decided to change the subject, because she didn't want him to be angry at her.  "Also, you left a sock in here this morning," she said.  "I don't know how you can just leave  _one,_  didn't you notice when --"

"If you had a problem you should have said something," he said, "not gone  _sneaking_  around like some kind of -- of saboteur or, or something!"  He actually looked pretty upset.  He was waving his arms around like a maniac and his face was getting all blotchy under the day's makeup, which he hadn't bothered to wash off yet, apparently.

She guessed she should feel sorry or something, but she was starting to get annoyed at how  _bratty_  he was.  "Like I said before, now I know why you need the script," she said.  "You were getting really cranky, and when you're cranky, _everyone's_ cranky, and also, to be very frank, you're rotten in bed when you're drunk, so --"

"You know what?  Fuck this. Between that goddamn director and the press agents and, and -- well, everyone's already trying to control me, I guess I should've expected it from you too," he snapped.  He stormed out of the tent.

She reached over and turned off the radio, and tried to think about what had just happened.

She realized, distantly, that she was actually going to be very sad in about a day.  She wasn't about to cry  _now_ , but she'd grown very used to Robert and his jokes and his stupid flattery.  These things never impacted her in the moment, for some reason.  She could act an immediate reaction as well as any girl who got cast, and even cry on command, but things never hit her like that in reality.  She was able to pack them away and carry them with her for at least a day, usually, until some stupid little thing reminded her of what was wrong and it all came out again.

Anyway, she was slightly irritated with herself for not having kept enough distance in her relationship with Robert.  She'd become attached.  She'd known he was going to drop her as soon as they got back to California, of course, because he was that kind of man and she'd gone in knowing that.  And yet she'd meddled and he'd taken offense, and now things were going to be rotten between them for the rest of the filming.

She was actually much more annoyed at how much work she'd have to put into finishing this letter, which had been sincerely cheerful for a page and a half, and would now have to be fake-cheerful while she finished the last paragraph.

Not for the last time, she wondered what was wrong with her.

* * *

The next day was all right.  They did all the scenes with elephants in them, because elephants were a hassle.  Mr. Musterhausen was cranky, though, and Robert said nothing to her that wasn't in the script, and she worked her ass off acting like nothing was wrong for all three of them.  "Remember, you're  _furious_  at her in this scene," Mr. Musterhausen said to Robert, almost pleadingly.  "She could have  _died!_   You  _love_  her!  So try to be lovingly furious, just  _try_.  Please.  At least try not to act like you're made of plaster."

She'd laughed at that.  God, he was trying so hard not to show his anger that now he couldn't even fucking  _act_ _angry_ _._   But finally, after another take, something snapped loose and he started snarling his lines and avoiding her eyes and his voice shook a little, and that was what had finally brought it home for her.

She hadn't actually been scripted to cry in this scene.  She was supposed to get all huffy and self-righteous.  But Mr. Musterhausen had liked it, so millions of people would be paying to watch her cry real tears in a few months, and that just made everything worse.

She ate lunch hurriedly that day, and retreated to the safety of her tent, but the thing about tents, the fucking  _worst_  thing about them, was that nobody ever knocked and you couldn't even yell at them for it.  So when she heard Robert clear his throat, her first thought wasn't  _Oh no_  or  _Why doesn't he go away_  or anything, it was just  _Fuck tents, I hate tents._   She grabbed the single sock she'd balled up the day they'd had their fight, and only bothered to look up to throw it at his head.  "You left this."

He caught it.  "Thanks.  I, uh.  I'm sorry I lost my temper."  His voice was unexpectedly gentle, and he wouldn't meet her eyes.

She stared at him.  He looked… awkward and ashamed.  It was not something she'd ever expected of him.  He was so graceful and at ease no matter what happened.  A (non-tranquilized) lion had wandered onto the set once, quite unexpectedly, and he'd ad-libbed the entire scene around staying between her and the lion, which was so courageous and sweet of him that she'd almost forgot to be scared.  And here he was cringing about how he'd treated her.  "What?" she said.

"Patty's gonna be furious with me when she has to redo your makeup."  He gave her a lopsided smile.

"Why are you here?" she said.

He hesitated.  "I just.  I wanted to say sorry, that's all.  I lost my temper, and I shouldn't have, and --"

"Okay," she said.  She swallowed.

"-- and I understand if you don't want --"

"No, no, I said okay," she said.  "I forgive you, I guess."  She was still a little confused because she had almost come around to deciding she'd been in the wrong, and was just going to take it as a lesson not to get carelessly involved with leading men, but he was apologizing.  "I mean.  I've mostly been angry at myself," she said.

That made his expression worse, like she'd kicked him in the chest or something, and then he was sitting on the bed next to her and apologizing and offering his handkerchief -- his  _prop_  handkerchief, which had to be spotless, so she had to decline it and go get her own -- but when she came back he wrapped his arms around her and she leaned her head on his shoulder and she sobbed an embarrassing amount of times and when she was done, he took her in his arms and kissed her like she was precious to him, and --

"Oh!"  It was Patty.

 _Fuck tents._   She  _hated_  tents.

"Um," she said, when she'd disentangled herself from Robert.  "What?  What is it, what do you need, is it Mr. Musterhausen --"

Patty was looking incredibly worried.  She hadn't looked this distraught since that time someone had left a tube of lipstick out in the sun and it had melted all over the eye shadow.  "I, um, no, it's not him, it's, it's.  There's a woman here to see, um, Mr. Kingsley?"

Marge did not like where this was going, and a glance at Robert suggested that he was  _extremely_  uncomfortable.  She scooted away from Robert on the bed.  "Go on."

"She.  She says she's his fiancée."

"And, what, she just dropped in to see him in the Serengeti?  It just happened to be on her way?"  Oh, she needed to stop saying these things.  She wasn't going to like the answer.

Patty looked even more uncomfortable.  "She's, um.  She's Violet Vandenberg."  Ah.  Not an actress.  Daughter of Horace Vandenberg, noted oil magnate and financier.  She could drop in whenever she wanted to, even the middle of nowhere, which was not yet a luxury Marjorie Finn, Rising Star, could afford.

"You have, um, lipstick on you," Patty told Robert.

Oh, yes, he was still here.  Weird how he hadn't said anything.

"Right," said Marge, because this was the time to act decisively.  She stood up, dried the last of her tears, and forcefully used her handkerchief to get the lipstick off of Robert's face.

He didn't say anything during all of this.  He just looked stricken, and wouldn't meet her eyes again.

When she was done, she turned to Robert.  "Are you going to tell me this is all a big silly misunderstanding and she's not really your fiancée only you're doing her a favor and pretending, or maybe she's silly and mistaken and smitten, or something like that?"

Robert still didn't say anything.

" _Well?_ " she demanded.

"No," he said, not to her, oh no.  He made this admission to his knees, which he was staring at sheepishly.  "No, I just lied to you.  I was going to -- I was going to break it off with her, but."  He winced.  "But I didn't."

"Jesus.  Get the hell out of my tent," she snapped.

He got the hell out of her tent.  After a few moments, she faintly heard him say "Vi!  What a surprise!" from outside.

Patty stared at the door to the tent, wide-eyed.  "What an _asshole_ ," she said.

"Yeah," said Marge.

"Are you all right?" Patty asked.

"Yeah.  I will be for a day or two.  Hopefully she'll be gone when I crack," said Marge.  She stood, but Patty stopped her. 

"Wait, you should met me redo your makeup," she said.  "Can't go out looking like that, can you?"

Marge slumped back down on the bed, sighing.  "Oh, god, I almost forgot, I must look like a circus clown right now."

"I'll go and get the makeup," said Patty, hurrying out of the tent.  Marge washed her face.  Fortunately, Patty worked quickly, and Robert's fiancée's visit had disrupted the schedule enough that nobody noticed their absence.

* * *

The absolute worst thing about Vi Vandenberg, aside from her rat of a fiancé, was that Marge  _liked_  her.  Like tents, it was hard to knock her.  She was nice.  She was refreshingly sincere and surprisingly shy.  (The papers called this  _reclusive_  and  _aloof_ , so it came as a bit of a shock.)  It was all very frustrating.  Marge had initially gone out of her way to spend time with her, planning to grit her teeth the whole time, just to prove some sort of point about how she absolutely was not sleeping with Robert and it was definitely a business relationship, but Vi didn't seem to notice any kind of tension between them.  Instead, she said she liked Marge's hair and asked her questions about what it had been like to grow up in Minnesota.  She had even managed to sound interested!  (There had been at  _least_ three giraffes on the set at the time.  Vi did not appear to care about them.  No, she really wanted to know about Minnesota.  It was absolutely baffling.)

At one point she confided to Marge that she really didn't know the difference between bad acting and good acting.  "I don't know, Robbie's always very critical of other people's performances and I think he's being a little unfair sometimes.  I guess I figure as long as they don't mess the lines up it works for me."

She just couldn't hate anyone that oblivious.  She felt  _bad_  for Vi sometimes, and often a little jealous of her for the way she floated through life without noticing the tension between her and Robert, or the way Mr. Musterhausen complained under his breath about Vi wandering on set to talk to people for a while in between takes.  But Vi went out of her way to be kind, and unlike so many of the people Marge met these days, she had no interest in being involved in the movies at all.

If Robert Kingsley was a car accident waiting to happen, Vi Vandenberg was a passing deer hypnotized by the headlights of the car going over the bridge and right towards her.

Marge wondered what that made her.  An empty bottle of cheap scotch, she decided.  One the car's driver didn't even take his time to enjoy.

She was entirely too sober to be having these kinds of melodramatic thoughts.  She wondered how much the giraffe handler would want her to pay to start smuggling _her_ some of that lousy scotch.  Or maybe he could find something more palatable.

One day, while she was waiting for Robert and Ed Patterson to play a scene to Mr. Musterhausen's standards, she decided she was going to settle something for  _sure._   She flipped through her script, to the lion scene where her character did practically everything short of sticking her head in the lion's mouth.  She had been over it with Mr. Musterhausen several times, and was still absolutely certain no sensible person would do this, but Mr. Musterhausen kept explaining to her that she was just frightened of the lion.  Which was not  _technically_  untrue.

But!   _She_  was playing an heiress.  Vi Vandenberg was also an heiress!  Clearly if Vi wouldn't play cat and mouse with a lion, Marge shouldn't have to.  So she went and sat down where Vi was sitting in the shade of an awning, watching everyone film.

"I assumed film sets would be more exciting," Vi whispered to her.  She had her elbow on her knee and her chin on her hand, and she looked even tireder than Robert and Ed.  "I thought things would move faster, and there would be more, I don't know."  She waved her hands vaguely.  "Conflict, and things.  Actors are meant to be high-strung, aren't they?"

Oh, she had  _no idea_.  "Well, sometimes Mr. Musterhausen gets off his chair and waves his cigar around, and then we go back to not listening to him," Marge said.

"Oh, yes, I've seen that," said Vi.  She paused to watch Robert, Ed, and several natives (including the giraffe handler, although it took her a moment to recognize him with his face all painted up like that) run through a routine roughly in the spirit of "Who's On First" before Mr. Musterhausen started shouting again.  "How long are they going to say the same things over and over?" she asked.  "Isn't this a terrible waste of time?"

 _And film_ , Marge thought.  "Until Mr. Musterhausen's happy," she sighed.  "In the meantime, though, I have a question I'd like to ask."

"Sure!" said Vi, turning towards her.

Marge riffled through the script until she found the right page.  "All right.  So there's this one scene that's caused some controversy among the cast, and -- well, here, read it," she said, handing Vi the script.  "Tell me what you think of it.  Be honest."

She watched Vi skim the script, and frown.  "…I guess it's funny," she said, hesitantly.

"But you think it's ridiculous," prompted Marge.  "Don't you?"

"We-ell…."  She looked unhappy.  "Well, don't tell anyone I said this, but yes."

"Ha!  Perfect!  I'll go tell Mr. Musterhausen as soon as they get this scene right," said Marge.

Vi's eyes got very wide and worried.  "Oh, no, no, no, please don't!  I don't think he likes me."

"Oh, I'm sure that's not true," said Marge.  It was a testament to her obliviousness that Vi was uncertain about having earned Mr. Musterhausen's ire, because he plainly loathed her.  Marge had once accidentally overheard him and Robert arguing about her presence on the set a couple of times.  He'd been ranting about how Vi had "ruined the chemistry," and apparently Robert hadn't had the heart to tell him that actually, he'd ruined the chemistry by being a lying cheating asshole.  "I'm sure he likes you just fine!  He's just… eccentric."

"Yes, that's what Robbie said," said Vi.  "…Would it  _help_  you, to tell him?  Do you not think you can act the scene?  I'm sure you could!  Not that I'd really know," she added, "but.  I mean.  Robbie said your acting was really great, and I know he knows."

Ugh.  Marge considered her options.  She didn't  _want_  to have to play alongside a lion, but if she managed it without being eaten it'd be pretty impressive, and she certainly didn't want to throw Vi to the lion, as it were.  "No, it's fine, I just wanted to see what you thought," she said.  "I'm just not very happy to tempt fate like this.  Or lions.  And every time I think today's the day we're going to film it and I'll be able to get it over with, there's some problem with the lion -- it's sick, or in a bad mood, or whatever --"  She shook her head.  "I mean, you can see why I'd be a little nervous, can't you?"

Vi nodded.  "That sounds terrifying!  Are you sure you don't want me to talk to Mr. Musterhausen --"

"No, no, it's fine," said Marge.  She could hear him trying to justify its presence in the script now, no matter how many people Marge had on her side.

They both jumped when Mr. Musterhausen shouted " _Finally!_   Finally!  Get off my set, all of you, even I need a break after that nonsense."

Oh, good, Robert was coming towards them, and meanwhile her only real friend among the cast at the moment, Ed Patterson, was busy talking to the giraffe-handler and his friends.  It looked like he was telling them all a riotously funny story, and she wished she was over there and not fake-smiling at Robert.  "Hello, girls!  How'd we do?"

"It was all right," said Vi, not sounding particularly impressed.  Marge held back a laugh at how dismayed her answer seemed to make Robert.  "Do you always do the same scene eight hundred times?" she asked.  She was so painfully earnest.  She should  _not_  be marrying into the film industry.

"Oh, no," said Marge.  "Sometimes we redo them _twelve_ hundred times!"

Robert shot her a look.  It wasn't overtly hostile, she'd give him that, but it definitely said something like  _I'd appreciate it if you'd keep your mouth shut._  To Vi, he said, "I think Gus was in a rotten mood today."

"He seems like he's in a rotten mood  _every_  day," Vi sighed.  "You said he was nice!"

"He was nice!" said Robert.  "I mean, he is nice.  He is  _extremely_  nice."  He put his arm around Vi's shoulder.  "Come on, if we hurry we can watch Harry over there water the giraffes.  They look pretty funny when they're drinking."

"Kind of like some people," said Marge, keeping her tone blandly cheerful.

Robert ignored this, and put his arm around Vi.  "Come on, I'll introduce you to Harry and his giraffes.  I can't pronounce any of their names, though," he added.

Marge watched them walk away, wishing she wasn't sick to the teeth of Robert right now.

* * *

Violet Vandenberg left, as blithely ignorant as she had been when she arrived, and unfortunately that meant Marge couldn't keep avoiding Robert now.  The morning of their first Vandenberg-free day, just before they started their take, she said, as forcefully as she could under her breath, "Robert, we have a lot to talk about.  Meet me after dinner.  My tent."  Then, of course, Mr. Musterhausen had called for quiet and snapped "Action!" and she launched right into " _Darling, after these last few days I can't imagine living without you!_ "

" _Oh, Dolores!_ "  And he practically held her up as she draped herself over his body.

" _It's just that -- what would my father say?_ " she said, voice tremulous.  " _And oh, Walter, what will my_ husband _say?_ "  She began weeping as prettily as possible.

God, this shit was exhausting sometimes.

Robert was a twit the whole day -- kicking the set, accidentally breaking props, snapping at  _everyone_.  Marge was coldly satisfied that Elise gave him hell for mistreating his boots; while she was getting her makeup touched up she distinctly heard him shout before Elise offered insincere apologies about poking him with a needle.

That evening, she was sure he wouldn't show, but surprisingly enough, he did.  "Well?" he said, irritably.  "You  _summoned_  me.  What do you want?"

She laughed, not very happily.  "You can't figure it out?"

He sighed.  "Well, I would imagine it has something to do with Violet."

"She's a nice girl," said Marge.  "Pity about the fiancé.  Why is your engagement a secret, though?  Oh, wait, I'm guessing that would be  _so_ inconvenient for you."

He sighed.  "No, no, it's nothing like that, she just -- she doesn't want her dad to find out.  He's an asshole.  Thinks I'm bad news."

"Perceptive guy," said Marge.  She was enjoying herself in a bitter kind of way -- she was almost giddy with rage.  She decided one day she was going to make a  _fantastic_  villainess, and filed the almost-physical sensation of powerful rage away for later use.  "Well, I'm glad it affords you so much freedom."

"It's not like that!  I'm not -- I'm not a  _bad guy,_ " said Robert.

She rolled her eyes.  "No, no, of course you're not.  It was an accident!  She just slipped your mind!  I seduced you!  Or something."

"Jesus, Marge, would you just  _let it go_  --"

"No!  No, I will not fucking let it go," she snarled, and oogh, she was losing control here.

"What are you so angry about, anyway?  You just see me as  _convenient_  and  _here,_  not like you gave a fuck about me," he snapped.

She laughed, incredulous.  "You should talk!  How can you possibly paint  _me_  as the villain in this situation?"

"I didn't say you were the  _villain,_ " he said, rolling his eyes, "I just pointed out you were using me.  You came in acting like I was some kind of infamous terrible heartbreaker and I figured, what the hell, everyone says that and I never get to have any real fun, because --"

"And your fiancée?" she asked.

"Well, like I said, I was going to break up with her!  I just, it was never the right  _time_  and then I figured, after I get back from Africa I'll say we just grew too much apart, not enough in common, and then she turned up and I --"

"That is such bullshit and you know it," she snapped.  "God, you're a mess, I don't even know what I saw in you."

"Like I said," he said, so arrogantly that she very much wanted to slap him, but she hadn't been this close to him in days, and she hadn't seen so much real raw emotion from him… ever.  "I was  _convenient._   I filled a  _role_  to you, nothing more."

"Robert, shut the hell up and quit acting like I'm the one who --"

"No, look, this happens all the time to me," he said, as if he was making some kind of a reasonable argument.  "Women, they see me as this, this no-good kind of archetype, they have a fling, and then once they do that's it, they ditch me."  He was being whiny.  Unfortunately, it didn't make him any less attractive.  Even though she knew everything he said was complete self-serving nonsense, he really sold it.  And it was pissing her off that she actually almost wanted to give in and kiss it better.   _Ugh._

"Wow.  I've never met anyone so fucking self-centered," she said.  "And we work with Musterhausen, for  _fuck's sake._ "

"You're not  _listening_  to me," he said.

"No, I'm not.  Fuck you.  I'm sick of listening to you, every word out of your mouth is a lie."

Then she kissed him.  It wasn't a  _nice_  kiss -- there were teeth in it, and her hands were clawing at his shirt, and he was gripping her so hard it hurt.  She pulled away and looked up at him.

"Jesus, Marge."  He paused to catch his breath, looking slightly taken aback..  "…This is  _just_ what I was talking about, you  _like_  this, don't you, this --"

"No, still not listening to you," she snarled.  She pulled him in again for another violent kiss, and he let her push him down onto the bed and straddled him.  God, he was already hard.  She began to unbutton his shirt, somewhat impatiently, but he reached out and cupped her chin and kissed her slowly and sweetly, and though she had a fleeting thought along the lines of  _This is a terrible idea_ , she couldn't hold onto it when he was overwhelming all her senses like this.

She had never done  _this_  -- she'd worked so hard to come off as worldly-wise that first day on set, but after she and Robert had started sleeping together, she'd always let him take control.  It seemed, from the way he moaned and begged and swore under her that night, that this was not really a given.  And after they finished, gasping and sweaty and exhausted, he gave her a foolish grin.  "And here I was worried about the lions.  Think you scratched my back up pretty good."

Oh, hell.  Makeup was going to kill them both if she had, she was pretty sure there was a scene coming up where he waded into a river shirtless.  She shoved him.  "Turn over, let me see your back."  As she examined him in the dim light of her tent's lantern, she remembered all the reasons she'd been pissed off at him.  She wasn't anymore, although she thought maybe she just felt too  _good_  to be angry and it'd all come back to her in the morning.  "You're fine, I didn't break the skin."  There were a few livid scratches, though.  Makeup could hide them.  He could say it was Vi's doing.

 _Vi._   She was a problem.  She was making Marge feel like scum.

Robert seemed fine, though.  "Heh, and here  _you_  were worried about lions," he laughed.

"Robert.  We can't keep doing this," she said.

"I know, costume'll murder me if you keep ripping buttons off my shirts," he said.

Oh, had she done that?  She had, hadn't she?  "What?  I thought that was  _your_  shirt," she said.

"Hey, what's the matter?" he asked.  "It's not about that fight we had, is it?"

"Robert,  _you have a fiancée,_ " she said, through gritted teeth.

"Yeah."  He sounded gloomy now.  "Okay, go ahead, call me a rat, hate me forever.  You'd be right to."

"No, we can't do that," she said.  "That'll just lead to… this, again."  She waved a hand vaguely to indicate him in her bed.  "God, why am I such an idiot?  …Okay.  You know what?  This is fine.  We can keep doing this.  But it  _stays here._   The minute we get back to California, we're -- we're just friends.  It's a one-movie fling.  Everyone has those.  Right?"

"…Right," he said.

" _Does_  everyone have those?" she asked, worried now.  Maybe everyone didn't have those.

"Well, I haven't conducted a survey or anything," he said.  "It stands to reason, though."

She couldn't tell if he was saying that because he wanted to keep fucking her or because it was actually what he thought.

"Fine.  Okay," she said.  "We can do this.  And then we'll just stop and everything will be fine.  Okay?"

"You know, I could still break it off with Vi," he said.  He sounded a little wounded.

God, she was not going to fall for his bullshit again.  "No," she said.  "Just.  It'll be fine.  Once we get back to California we can just… forget it ever happened."

That was a hell of a lie, and she could tell she wasn't selling it, because he looked pretty skeptical.  "I don't think I could forget you," he said, doubtfully.

"No sweet talk, Robert.  Not tonight," she sighed.

"Well, I'm glad we could have this talk," he said, moving to get out of the bed -- but she put a hand on his arm.

"I -- I didn't mean I wanted you to go.  Please stay here tonight?" she asked.

His face softened.  "Oh.  …Yeah.  Okay."  And as she fell asleep in his arms, she thought that maybe things would be all right after all.

* * *

And after that, things  _were_  all right, as long as she didn't think about them too hard.  Mr. Musterhausen was happy because their much-vaunted "chemistry" was back, the other cast and the crew were politely pretending nothing at all had changed about their demeanors.  Marge even managed to convince Robert that she knew what she was talking about when it came to staying on the crew's good side, particularly Elise the costume standby, although he still stupidly insisted that he didn't  _need_  to stay on everybody's good side, he was  _Robert Kingsley._   She reminded him that he was only  _Robert Kingsley_  because at some point people had decided they liked him, and not the other way around.

"I guess you have a point," he would tell her, seeming to give the impression of thoughtfulness and good sense.  Then he'd go back to doing what he always did, and being kind of a pain in the ass.

It was watching him do this sort of thing that brought her back to senses, if only briefly, and watching him occasionally do things just to annoy certain crew members when they seemed particularly cranky, she realized you  _didn't_  actually have to be an idiot to present yourself to a lion in the full expectation that it would leave you alone.  You just had to be convinced of your own invincibility.  So she incorporated that sort of thinking into how she played her scenes, and Mr. Musterhausen must have liked it, because he was very complimentary about how natural she made the dialogue seem.  He called her over to talk to her after a scene where she'd had to jump into crocodile-infested water to retrieve her favorite necklace.

"You played that very well indeed," he said.  "Thought you'd be more hesitant, because of the alligators, but you managed to make idiocy look almost  _noble._  Frankly," he told her, "while the story may be grand the words do not always live up to their potential."

"Crocodiles," she said.  "Are you saying the studio sent you to Africa to film a dog of a script?" she asked.

"I'm saying the studio sent me to Africa to film something spectacular and exotic, and this was script they had.  I think it was originally set in New York City before …very extensive rewrites."  He paused.  "And, though I don't think it should be general knowledge, several people thought it would be good for Mr. Kingsley to get some fresh air for a few months."

"Were you one of them?" she asked.

He shrugged.  "I don't care what he does off-camera, that's not my job.  But he remembers his lines better when he's clean and sober.  You know, you should work with him more often, he actually listens to you sometimes.  He doesn't listen to me at all anymore."  He shook his head.

Was that a suggestion or an offer?  Well, it almost didn't matter, because this thing between her and Robert was going to end, and after it did she suspected she wouldn't be such a good influence on him anymore.  She took a deep breath.  "Mr. Musterhausen, I came to Hollywood to be an actress.  There's nothing I'd like more in the world than to keep acting in whatever roles I can get, whether they're alongside Robert Kingsley or somebody else.  What I didn't come for was to be somebody's babysitter.  As I understand it, somebody else gets paid pretty lucratively for that and I'd be stepping on their toes anyway."

He laughed.  "You're very smart, Miss Finn.  Very diplomatic.  Now, if you can manage Robert Kingsley, talk back to me, and brave  _alligators_ , why can't you handle a little lion."

"They're crocodiles, Mr. Musterhausen," she reminded him again.

"Big goddamn lizards, whatever they are," he said, waving a hand dismissively.  "I don't care about them, I'm asking about the lion."

"Well.  I'm allergic to cats," she said, "and --"

"Are you afraid of  _sneezing?_ " he asked.

"Well, no," she said, "but try to look at it from my point of view.  It's a lion, and the script has me tugging on its tail, and its mane, and patting its nose, and then lying in front of it, and then it's supposed to lunge for me while I have my back to it," she said.  " _I'd_  bite anyone who tried that on me if it wasn't going to end up all over the papers the next day.  Can't I just, I don't know,  _sunbathe_  in front of the lion?"

"Hmm.  Well, I'll think about it," he said.  She sighed.  "We've been having enough lion problems that we might have to write that scene out anyway."

"What?  I thought the lion scene was tomorrow," she said.  They only had a few weeks left of filming, and she had  _really_  been looking forward to getting it over with so she could either enjoy the last few weeks of filming lion-free or, if things went horribly wrong, become a post-mortem success and be able to say  _I told you so_  from the grave.

He shook his head.  "We're going to have to push it back.  Our lion tamer has... well, I don't know exactly what happened to him," he said.

"What?  He wasn't eaten, was he?" she asked, horrified.

"No, no, nothing like that," he said, clearly trying to be reassuring.  "He was having some trouble with some fellows in Musoma who he owed money to, from what I understand.  So he vanished.  And he took his lion with him.  We're going to have to make do, with Olomayiani."

"…who?"  Marge frowned.

"The giraffe handler!" he said, as if she was an idiot.

"Oh!  I thought his name was Harry," she said.

She looked at her like she was crazy.  "Well, whatever his name is, his friends may be able to get us a lion."

"And tame it?  In hardly any time?"

"It's going to be fine," said Mr. Musterhausen quickly, which wasn't reassuring at all.

She pretended to be reassured nonetheless.  "All right.  Well.  That's good to know."  She hoped Harry or Olomayiani or whatever his name was decided Mr. Musterhausen was crazy and told him he could find his own damn lion and they had to cut that scene out of the movie, although since it was what led to the big confession of love that could be an issue.  Well, whatever.  It wasn't Marge's movie, after all.  She was just starring in it.

* * *

A week later, they'd almost finished filming, and Mr. Musterhausen was getting impatient about his lion, and the crew were getting impatient about other things.

"Isn't the rainy season starting soon?" said Elaine from costuming.

"Oh,  _that's_  gonna be fun," said Stan, the electrician.  He crossed his arms and glared at Mr. Musterhausen.

"Everyone just keep your pants on," said Mr. Musterhausen.  "The studio's willing to give us a few more weeks if we can just get that lion in the picture.  We're definitely going to be back home by Thanksgiving and Stan, I know you can handle a little rain if it comes to that."

Ed Patterson cleared his throat.  "I still don't see why we needed to send out a search party just to get a lion.  Couldn't we call MGM up and see if theirs was free?"

"Don't talk treason with me, Patterson," snapped Mr. Musterhausen.  Then he clapped his hands and dismissed the gathered cast and crew.  "Now, let's quit wasting time and get this movie done!"

And by god, they did.  Elaine came through beautifully with a highly impractical flowing yellow gown that Marge wished she could keep, and all the smoldering arguments in the script flowed wonderfully.  In his last scene, Ed ad-libbed something Mr. Musterhausen liked enough to keep in -- Marge thought this was Ed's way of apologizing, and Mr. Musterhausen's way of accepting the apology.  They positively sped through the filming, and by some miracle, finished all of their non-lion scenes to Mr. Musterhausen's satisfaction well before sunset.

And when the cameras stopped rolling, it was almost like that first day on set had been.  She looked at Robert.  "I guess now we wait for the lion to get here," she said.

"If the lion doesn't get the hunting party first," said Ed darkly.  "Hmph.  What a dangerous, stupid thing to do."

"Aw, I'm sure they'll be back in a day or two, don't worry about it," said Robert.  "Hey, Marge, come here, I want to show you something."  He grabbed her hand and tugged her off set.

"Is it the sunset again?  Because I've seen that before, and it's too early for that anyway," she said, hurrying to keep up.  But when they stopped, they were standing in front of the airplane.  It was a gorgeous old biplane, and George the stuntman had done some amazing tricks with it.  Robert had been relegated to sitting in it on the ground with a fan in front of the nose for all the close-ups, but Marge knew he'd been aching to go up in it for real.

George was there now, actually; he seemed to be doing a little once-over of the plane.  He looked over his shoulder after checking the propeller.  "You want help with takeoff?" he asked Robert.

And then Robert turned to her.  "What do you say we get out of here, just for a little bit?" he asked her, grinning.

"What, really?  And just… ditch everybody else?" she asked.

George grinned.  "I figure they'll notice the noise just a little before takeoff, but they won't be able to catch up with you 'til you're up in the air."

"Are you sure you can pilot it?" she asked Robert.

"Please.  I flew during the war," said Robert.  "Something a little more modern, obviously, not one of these things.  But these are pretty easy to fly.  I could probably teach you if you wanted," he said.

That sounded like it would take more than a couple weeks of filming, and, oh, now that he brought it up, she was painfully conscious once more about how little time they had together.  "Maybe," she said, noncommittally.  "Let's not worry about that now.  Let's just get the hell out of here."

He laughed.  "I knew there was a reason I liked you."

* * *

The savannah was beautiful from the air.  She hadn't really been able to appreciate that, for all the time she'd spent there.  She knew the same five patches of land so well, and the fact that there was  _this much_  out there -- this much space full of wide-open wilderness -- amazed and astounded her.  She'd known it was there, on some dry intellectual, geographical level -- she'd looked at maps before she'd left -- but to see it all laid out before her was astonishing.  Huge herds of animals passed below them, and at one point, seeing her fascination, Robert dipped the plane down so she could get a better view of some gazelles, and watch them flock and flow like a school of fish in an amber sea.

When they landed, just as the sun was starting to go down, Robet helped her out of the plane and she looked around in wonder.  Then she grabbed him and kissed him.  They weren't hiding and they weren't filming, and she knew it was too good to last, but she was going to make the most of this while she could.

They spent the night in a tent he'd packed, and most of the next day wandering the plains, just for the hell of it.  When the sun set they wandered back to their camp and they grilled hot dogs Robert had swiped from the cook's stores.  (Marge burned hers, as she'd predicted, and of course Robert made fun of her.)

That second night, as she was drifting off to sleep in his arms, he drew her closer and sighed.  "I wish I could just stay here forever with you."

This, from the man who notoriously carried a mirror so he could check his hair before walking out onto the red carpet.  She grinned to herself.  "Don't be ridiculous, no you don't.  You wouldn't give up regular hot showers for me."

"Maybe I would!  You don't know!" he said, suddenly sounding both awake and slightly indignant.

"No one's worth regular hot showers, Robert," she said.  "Go to sleep."

The next day brought a brief rainstorm.  It was so hot it was something of a relief, but with some regret, Marge pointed out that they'd probably better be getting back to the set before Mr. Musterhausen sent someone to murder them in their sleep or something.

"He'd never do that, don't be ridiculous," said Robert.  "Then we wouldn't be able to shoot that lion scene."

"Hm.  Maybe after he does that he'll feed us to the lion," said Marge.  She could see the headline.   _Director Slays Two Stars Over Creative Differences,_  and then underneath that, in smaller text  _Their Last Film, 'Wildest Dreams,' Predicted Big Success_.  If they couldn't wring every last drop of publicity out of something like that, the studio's press agents ought to quit in shame.

"All right, all right, I see what you mean," he sighed.  "Once this rain lets up we'll head back."

They retreated, dripping, to the tent, and sat together quietly, his arm around her, her head on his shoulder.  She'd never felt so peaceful in all her life.  But all too soon the rain let up, and they headed back.

* * *

Mr. Musterhausen was furious, of course, but Robert was entirely unapologietic and Marge couldn't find it in herself to regret their little field trip, either.  It was really starting to sink in that it was going to be over soon, and when Mr. Musterhausen called everyone together later that day to say that he'd received a messenger from the lion hunting party, Robert and Marge exchanged a silent look.  This was it; the beginning of the end.

She was surprised at how completely non-intimidating she found the lion in the end.  It was certainly large, and it had impressive fangs, but mostly it looked bored.  She found that while she'd been away they'd retooled the script so that she wouldn't actually have to touch the lion, just lounge around next to it in an impractical dress, and they would shoot the lion's ferocious roar and lunge forward with a stuntwoman in a wig.

And in just a few days, they were packing up to go home.

She spent her last night in Africa alone, wondering how it had gone by so quickly.  She and Robert barely spoke, and when they did it was all practical things, and a few shared jokes with the rest of the cast.

When she got back to her apartment after spending what felt like days going from airport to airport, it was mid-morning and she collapsed into bed, ready to sleep for weeks.

She felt oddly empty when she awoke.  It was a little before midnight, and she desperately needed coffee, breakfast, and someone to talk to.

It was a strange thing to feel so alone in a city of nearly two million people, and even moreso since she'd spent the past few months on the savannah, away from civilization and crowds, and had grown to feel entirely at ease their.

She left a message with her maid service to tell them she'd returned.  Then she worked her way through a few cigarettes, reveling in how easy it was to just go to the corner store and buy a pack, and read some of the magazines that'd piled up while she was away.  She tried to go back to sleep, and managed to wake up again when it was still light out, though the sun was dipping low in the sky already.

A few friends insisted on taking her out to dinner that evening, even though she was sure she looked awful, and she started to feel a little more like herself again.  She had an hours-long call with her parents in Minneapolis, who had many distracting questions, none of which were about handsome leading men, and she gave a few cheerful, somewhat bland interviews about how exciting it had been to travel.

Then the call from the studio came.  They were going to reshoot a few of her and Robert's scenes on a soundstage.  Apparently somebody was worried the censors would decide she and Robert were guilty of "excessive or lustful kissing" in some of the scenes.  She wondered if the boys down at the Hays Office had ever had fun in their lives, but she couldn't really argue that those scenes  _weren't_  a little excessive or lustful, so off she went to the studio, and submitted to the vagaries of costume and makeup while she looked over the suggested changes to blocking.

When she finally got out to the set, Robert was there, in full safari attire, and still stupidly gorgeous.  "Hey," she said.

He smiled.  It was a friendly smile, but she knew him too well now to miss that it wasn't his real smile.  "Afternoon," he said.

They went through the motions of reshooting the scenes.  They were agonizingly close, but barely did more than hold hands.  It was almost comical -- how could anyone take a line like " _Say you'll remember me, even if it's just in your wildest dreams!_ " seriously when all Robert did was put an arm around her?

And she realized, in the middle of a take, that god, she was  _still_  trying to make this last, even if it was over -- still relishing the feel of being next to him, and the smell of him, and trying to pretend that the wind from the fans and the painted sunset behind them were real.

And then it was over for real.  The cameras stopped rolling, Mr. Musterhausen declared himself satisfied, if not necessarily pleased that at the absence of  _chemistry_ , and they started turning out the lights.

Robert didn't even say goodbye before he left.  Probably that was for the best.  And she was trapped in that odd, shut-down state, where she didn't really feel anything, which was also for the best.

She wondered how long she'd have before the grief of losing Robert caught up to her.

* * *

It turned out that she could go an awfully long time before that hit her.  She'd moved on, and started work on another project -- a picture vaguely based on some drively Victorian novel -- but then the premier of "Wildest Dreams" had happened and she had opted to be an idiot in front of a huge crowd.  Oh, sure, things had started out just fine -- she'd waved to the fans, said hello to Robert and Vi -- who were just back from their honeymoon -- and smiled when Ed introduced her to his latest girlfriend, who was playing the role well enough.

The censors, as it turned out, hadn't objected to  _all_  of the kissing, which on a critical and commercial level was a huge relief, because she didn't think the lion and the giraffes could carry the whole movie.  On a personal level, though, it was rough -- watching herself cry over thinking she'd lost Robert to her own meddling, watching them argue viciously and kiss and make up, and then, the last straw -- that first scene they'd filmed, where he kissed her twenty times and the last one had been the only one Mr. Musterhausen had liked.

It was all too much.  She fled the theater.  She thought she saw Robert in the side view mirror of the car as it sped away, but she didn't dare look back at him.

Of course, the press had noticed it.  They'd drawn the obvious conclusion, and when she tried to insist that she'd been taken suddenly ill the speculation had gone from "Did Marjorie Finn have an affair with Robert Kingsley?" to speculating that she'd been taken ill due to a pregnancy.

Then Vi Kingsley (née and soon-to-be-once-more Vanderberg) had dumped a drink on her head at a restaurant and there was no stopping the story.  Marge tried to be flip about it ("What a waste of a mint julep!" she told one paper) but in the privacy of her own mind, she had to admit she'd deserved it.  She'd done something awful, and anyway, she didn't think there was any way to apologize that wouldn't get her another unwanted mint julep.

Robert had tried to call her at least five times and she'd hung up on him every time.  She didn't want to know what he'd said.  His and Vi's divorce was messy and very public, which was a pity because it made it difficult for her to avoid hearing about it -- on the radio, from friends, in the magazines.

Still, at least "Wildest Dreams" had been a huge success, and her treacly Victorian movie did quite well too.  (She wasn't very fond of it -- she had a lengthy Saintly Death Scene that had taken far too many takes to get right and still turned out tedious to watch, and Marge vowed then and there that she'd never die such a beautiful and saintly death again, either on film or in real life.)

About a year after the debacle, she finally called Robert up.  She just wanted to… apologize, maybe?  At the very least, she wanted to see how he was.  He'd been seen with three different girls in the past two weeks, and was drinking again, and he'd just been cast as a swashbuckling hero in a pirate flick, so she harbored no illusions that he'd come running back to her arms.

Which was good, because he'd been dead drunk when he picked up.  " _Maaaargie_ ," he said.  "'Snice to hear from you!  How ya been?  Hey, hey, d'you know -- d'you know Cynthia Delaney?"

"I don't and I'm not sure I want to," she said, grimacing to herself.

"No, no, no, she's right here, lemme get her," he said into the phone, being much too loud.

She hung up before she could talk to Miss Delaney.

* * *

From then on she focused on her own career, and she had a pretty good time with it.  She started getting typecast as a glamorous seductress, which was flattering on one level but frustrating and dull on another.  So she started picking up odder roles, and it was on the set of a horror movie where she met her first husband.  She'd been playing a restless spirit, doomed to haunt the place of her death until she had vengeance, and he'd been trying to direct her.  They'd had a couple of arguments, at least until she'd started to find the arguments agreeable.  One thing had led to another, and…

And now, ten years later, she had a daughter and a shiny new divorce judgment and an upcoming role on a Western.  She would be playing a world-weary but still-beautiful pioneer woman and her opposite number would be Everett Tanner, a sturdy, well-established, and slightly bland cinematic hero.  She'd never worked with Tanner, and the gossip mill suggested he had a mildly obnoxious sense of humor, but was decent to work with as long as you didn't ask for anything too complicated.

And that was just fine with her, but unfortunately at the cast read-through, she was not prepared to find herself next to Robert Fucking Kingsley instead.

He greeted her cordially and she smiled blandly back at him and then, when she had the chance, she took the casting director aside and said "What the  _hell,_  Fred, what happened to Tanner?"

"Ah.  I should have mentioned that," he said.  "...is it going to be a problem?  We just thought …you two did such great work together in --"

"Yes, I know," she said.  She sighed.  She didn't want to be the bad guy here.  "No, it's not going to be a problem.  I won't let it be a problem."  She said this decisively, hoping that that would make it truer.

And for the most part it actually was true.  Robert was …not the same man he had been.

He took her out for coffee one day after filming, and even though she was newly free and the years had been good to him, he was  _married_  and she was not interested in fucking everything up in the same way.  She sipped her coffee, watching him cautiously, waiting for him to flirt so she could rebuff him.

But instead, he looked oddly sheepish.  "So, ah, I wanted to apologize for... everything."

"That's a lot of apologizing," she said.  "You've got your plate full.  _Everything?_ "

"I meant -- I meant the 'Wildest Dreams' -- the whole --"  He gestured expressively.

"Affair.  We had an affair," she said.  She sighed and put her coffee down, and leaned over it.  "For what it's worth, a lot of it was my fault too."  She looked into her coffee, and suppressed a smile.  It hadn't all been bad.

"Yes, but --"  He shook his head.  "Anyway, I, ah, I'm trying not to be that idiot anymore."  She'd been pretty fond of that idiot, and it must've shown, because he added quickly, "I mean, I'm trying not to be a thoughtless dick, I'm still  _me._ "

She snorted.  "Right.  I can tell."  She considered her next words carefully.  "Robert, look, if we're going to do this Western together, we're going to be professional about it.  All right?"

"Of course," he said.  He looked serious.  He  _sounded_  serious.  She was skeptical.

After that, she was waiting for him to try something, but he never did.  She was both relieved and a little disappointed, but there it was.  Throughout rehearsals and filming, there was certainly a tension between them, but once the cameras stopped rolling they could chat amicably.  He was kind, and surprisingly helpful about the divorce, and he had apparently given up drinking, which she only found out after  _she_  called him one night, in a decidedly unprofessional frame of mind, after having about five too many and weepy about her ex.  (She had apologized profusely the next day, and had been very grateful her daughter Sandra had been staying with Marge's parents in Minneapolis.)

The press asked some very pointed questions, of course -- why wouldn't they? -- but she and Robert insisted they were Just Good Friends, and after the last few months, it actually felt true.

* * *

She didn't remarry.  She had affairs, certainly, but she shied away from anything serious, and as soon as something felt dangerous and intoxicating she left.  She had finally learned this lesson after a brief fling with a screenwriter had somehow metamorphosed into his fictionalized account of their time spent together making the rounds.  Fortunately, it wasn't very good, and it became a sort of party game, if somebody had a copy, to cast the major players and do dramatic readings.  Marge felt she did a very passable "Margaret Flynn," although her favorite part to play was that of the wronged screenwriter himself.

By the '70s, Marge knew she wasn't likely to be cast as a love interest anymore, but she had a fondness for the slightly off-kilter roles she got to play -- world-weary, cynical working women with shrewd advice for the fresh-faced young heroine, or cruel aging socialites who made everything terrible for everyone the moment they walked into the room.  She was no longer anyone's glamourous idol, but it was sort of exhausting being an idol, and anyway, being a huge bitch onscreen paid the bills and was a lot of fun besides.

And she kept in touch with Robert.  She kept a bit of an artificial distance, because she still didn't quite trust herself, but it was nice to have another friend, and he'd seen her at her worst.  They even worked together a couple of times -- he starred as a police detective in a ridiculous crime show for a few years, and she ended up getting cast as a recurring character, a crazed murderess who plagued his city.

It was a couple weeks after they'd finished filming the scene where she jumped off a cliff into the sea for obscure villainess reasons -- the writers weren't sure whether they wanted to bring her back or not next season -- when she got the call from Robert that his wife had died.

Marge and Robert's wife Susan had never been close, but she'd defrosted when she realized they were  _not_ , in fact, sneaking around behind her back, and she'd always been very kind to Sandra when they happened to all be invited to the same parties.  Susan had had to duck out of social events fairly often lately due to illness, but Marge had assumed flu, not... cancer, apparently.

"She didn't want it in the papers," said Robert.  "She didn't want everyone pitying her.  And now they're asking if it was some kind of overdose or if she was drunk, or -- god, I can't stand the thought of people assuming that, when she was the one who got me to cut that crap out."  He sounded angry and shaky and tired.

"Oh Jesus, Robert, please tell me you've got a PR guy on this and --"

"Oh, definitely, I didn't want to start yelling," said Robert.  "I just don't know what to do with myself.  Everyone's handling everything and I feel like... I feel like a ghost.  I can't do anything about anything and I'm just …completely insubstantial."  He took a deep, shaky breath.  "I'm sorry, I shouldn't be bothering you with --"

"No, no, I'm -- I'm glad you called," she said.  "How are you?  I mean, horrible, I know, but, you know, you can talk.  It's why you called, right?

"I guess.  I just… don't really feel anything," he said, in a very small voice.  "I don't know."

She could tell that was a lie.  "Really?" she asked.

"I... I really want a drink," he admitted.  He'd clearly been talking himself out of it for a while now.  He'd probably be able to keep it up on his own, but Marge didn't think he should have to.

"Why don't you come over here instead?" she said gently.  "We can have coffee and complain about asshole gossip columnists."

"I don't want to interfere," he said.   "I mean, you and Sandra don't want to play hostesses to some kind of wreck --"

"She's away at college," she said.  "Her freshman year.  I'm trying not to worry about her too much,  _you'll_  be doing  _me_  a favor if you come over."

So he did.  When he showed up at her door he looked… well, he looked flat-out awful.  She made him coffee and they reminisced for a while about old times -- "Gunslingers of the Santa Fe Trail" more than "Wildest Dreams," but a little of each -- and he told her what he'd heard about where old Gustof Musterhausen had ended up.

"I guess he's in Europe now.  Says he has more creative freedom there," he said.

"You think he ever got to make his moon unicorn movie?" she asked.

"Oh no no no, it's not on the moon anymore," he said, gravely serious.  "It's in the future.  There's a robot riding a unicorn but I guess he's decided it's not one of the bad guys anymore.  In fact, it's the hero's girlfriend!  See, bad guys don't get unicorns.  That would be wrong."

"Have I ever mentioned how much I admire your ability to say these things,  _unrehearsed,_  with an absolutely straight face?" she asked.  He laughed, which was a huge relief, because seeing that she knew his old self was still in there somewhere.

"I don't think you have," he said.  "Go on, tell me again!"  It was that old lopsided grin of his, the one she'd always had trouble resisting.

She considered how easy it would be to lean in and kiss him, and then how extraordinarily wrong that would be, given the circumstances.  She opted to resist the grin.  She had never quite shaken her feelings for Robert, but she'd learned not to act on them or give them much time in her thoughts.  "Nah," she said.  "You're already too full of yourself."

"You know me too well," he grumbled, but he was finally smiling again.  It was a shallow kind of smile, and she knew it wouldn't last very long, but it was real.

"Yeah, I do," she said.  "And I also know you're going to be all right eventually.  You know?"

"Yeah."  He frowned into his empty mug.  "Well, I don't think I want a drink anymore, so that's something.  But I still don't know what to do with myself now she's gone."

"Well," said Marge, and then she paused.  "I'm going to be hokey for a second."

He raised an eyebrow.  "Go on, I guess.  Hoke it up."

"Far be it for me to tell you what to do with the entire rest of your life," said Marge, "I'm just an actress, what do I know?  But I think, for tonight, that you should come to the movies with me."

He burst out laughing.  "Oh, come on, there's nothing good playing!"

"Weren't you in that war movie that came out last week?" she asked.

"Yes, and I should know, there's  _nothing_  good playing," he repeated.

"Well, then, we'll just have to make do with bad movies," she said.  "Come on, get off my couch, put on your sunglasses.  I'll call a cab and we'll try to go incognito."

* * *

After that, they went out pretty often, schedules permitting.  The press caught on, which was obnoxious, and Marge was aware that a few dedicated fans followed their eclectic choices in the gossip magazines and treated them as if they were actual critical endorsements, which was pretty funny because half the time the way Robert and Marge picked the movie was by showing up at some scuzzy little movie theater and asking which showing started first.  They watched a lot of crap.  It was fun, and during those first few months after Susan's death she got the impression Robert really  _needed_  plans and prior obligations that had nothing to do with contracts and shooting schedules.

One day, seven or eight years later, she had just come home from shooting a ridiculous fairy tale movie and was washing stray bits of spirit gum off in the sink when the phone rang.  She dabbed her face off with a towel and blindly grabbed for the phone.  "So what are we seeing tonight?" she asked.  "It's your turn.  Unless you want to pick a theater and just see what they have?"

"No, no, I know exactly what we're seeing," he said.  "Musterhausen's moon unicorn flick!"

"Hilarious," she said.  "No, seriously, tell me.  Or is it a surprise?  Are we going to see that thing where you're the Roman emperor?  Because I've been a wicked queen for a month now and I think my puppet minions could beat up your extras with their strings cut."

"Don't you sic your puppets on me, woman, I'm being serious!  He actually managed to get it made!" said Robert.

"You're joking," she said.  "Really?   _How?_...How does it look?"

"Well," he said diplomatically, "it certainly sounds ...interesting."

"Interesting, huh?  This I have to see," she said.

And that was how she and Robert ended up at an almost-empty arthouse somewhere on a Wednesday night, watching a movie in Esperanto (with English subtitles) that seemed to have no coherent plot.  It did have a lot of moving, idealistic speeches, martial arts, and gunfights.  Also, there was a half-naked robot lady on a unicorn.

"I don't think it really needed the unicorn, do you?" she asked.

"It needed a lot of things," he said.  "Probably not a unicorn, though."

"Excuse me!"  It was one of the other theatergoers, an enthusiastic young man.  "Are you -- are your Robert Kingsley and Marjorie Finn?"

"Nah, we're their stunt doubles," said Marge.  This was her standard response.  About half the time they took it seriously.

"Oh, oh, I heard you said that!" he said, excitedly.  "I heard that's what you  _always_  tell people!  Can I just say, I am such a fan of 'Vengeance of the Witch-Woman'?" he told her, in awe.

"Thank you," she said.

"And, and, can I just say it's great that you're, um, supporting smaller-budget movies and..."  He went off on a spiel, and she tuned him out, shooting a silent _look_ at Robert, who seemed to think this was hilarious.

There was an awkward silence, and Marge realized the fan was done.  "Thank you!  Yes, we're old friends of Mr. Musterhausen, we know how long he's wanted to make this movie," she said.

"Oh!  Oh!  And can I have your autograph?" he asked, and she complied.

When the fan had left, Robert said, "'Vengeance of the Witch-Woman,' huh?"

She shrugged.  "My ex directed it."

"Any good?"

She shrugged again.  "I mean, I liked it at the time.  Too embarrassing to rewatch."

"Ah, yeah, I get that," he said.  "...Actually, you know what I've never seen the whole way through?" he asked.

"'Wildest Dreams,'" she said.

He looked at her like she was an actual witch woman.  "What?  How'd you know?"

"Because you rushed out of the theater after I left, you twit," she said fondly.

"Ah.  Yeah."  He looked awkward.  "...You know, I -- I always really regretted --"

"I  _know,_ " she said.  Then she decided to ask him a question she'd never quite had the balls to ask after their reconciliation.  "Were you really going to break it off with Violet?"

He cringed.  "I think I assumed if I started something new it'd be easier to break up with her by telling her what a jerk I was," he said.  "I was a dumb kid."

She laughed.  "Come on, we both were.  I was  _so_  convinced that if we did everything right, no one would get hurt."

"We should see it some time," he said.

She frowned.  "What?  See what?"

"'Wildest Dreams.'  We should see if it still holds up."

"Or if it ever did in the first place?" she asked.

"That too," he said, agreeably.

"Does it really matter?" she asked.  "I mean, I think everything turned out all right, don't you?  Eventually.  After a lot of craziness."

There was that lopsided grin again.  "Yeah, I guess it did."  He looked at her for a moment, pensive, and then he leaned down and kissed her.

It was not cinematic.  They were standing outside a grungy theater, and it was starting to rain.  But it was just as good as she'd remembered -- better, even.  She leaned into it, savoring the feel of his arms around her.

When they pulled apart, she grinned up at him.  "Come on," she said, "let's get out of here. I know a little place not too far from here where we could watch the sun rise."

He returned her smile.  "Hey, stop stealing my lines."

"I say them better," she said, sliding her hand into his.

**Author's Note:**

> Research & References:
> 
> I discovered while googling various things in the video that "Musterhausen," the name of the director of the fictional movie "Wildest Dreams" in the video, is also the name of the director (and producer) of the extremely low-budget '80s sci fi western martial arts movie "Knights of Cydonia" in _that_ music video.
> 
> I was inspired a lot by accounts of the filming of "The African Queen," although it sounds like that filming was pretty harrowing at times and everyone got sick except for Humphrey Bogart and the director, John Huston, both of whom opted not to drink water at all. I figured with a more permanent base of operations for the filming of "Wildest Dreams," they'd have an easier time getting clean water.
> 
> Some of the behind-the-scenes drama was also heavily inspired by the films "Singing in the Rain," "A Star Is Born," and "Sunset Boulevard." ...And also maybe a little _Moving Pictures._


End file.
